Editorial | The real health parity

Anyone still doubting that people suffer from lack of access to health care should take a look at the front page of Sunday's Courier-Journal.

Depicted are the faces of people who have battled mental illness - for themselves or their loved ones - and are hopeful the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, will bring expanded access to care and medication they so desperately need.

They include a Bardstown woman whose insurance sharply limits care in a psychiatric hospital, a Paducah man with a similar plight and a Lexington mother scraping to pay for her adult son's costly mental health care and prescriptions because they lack insurance.

Despite laws at the state and federal level meant to establish "parity," or equal access to treatment for mental as well as physical illlness, patients and advocates say the two are not equal when it comes to health insurance. The industry routinely imposes stricter limits on mental health treatment when it comes to office visits, hospitalization and medication.

"If you treated oncology like you do behavioral health, you'd have people rallying in the streets," said Tony Zipple, CEO of Seven Counties Services, the Louisville-based regional community mental health agency.

The Affordable Care Act is expected to bring some welcome relief. Starting next year, it calls for the greatest expansion of mental health and substance abuse coverage in a generation.

Advocates are cautiously hopeful that the law will expand mental health coverage for far more Americans, including those who use online exchanges, such as Kentucky's kynect.ky.gov, to purchase individual health coverage starting Oct. 1.

The need for better mental health treatment has been tragically highlighted by a string of mass shootings by disturbed gunmen, most recently on Sept. 16 when Aaron Alexis, who had been hearing voices and exhibiting increasingly irrational behavior, went on a shooting spree in a Washington D.C. naval complex. He killed 12 people before he died.

Politicians, opposed to meaningful regulation of military-style firearms and ammunition, have begun pointing to mental health treatment as the answer to such events.

It's encouraging to find such politicians calling for greater access to better mental health treatment. Now they must follow through with support for Obamacare and stop political stunts aimed at blocking the law that would expand the mental health care they demand.

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Editorial | The real health parity

Anyone still doubting that people suffer from lack of access to health care should take a look at the front page of Sunday's Courier-Journal.